


and miles to go before i sleep

by littlequasimonsters



Series: home series [3]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Gen, pyeongchang 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 08:55:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13714296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlequasimonsters/pseuds/littlequasimonsters
Summary: Welcome home.





	and miles to go before i sleep

Here is what they don’t tell you about leaving home; it’s impossible to know when you’ll get to go back.

 

—

 

Yuzuru is not that old, but sometimes he feels ancient, thinks that he can count the ridges of tree rings in the space between his ribs. Yuzuru does not have with him that many years of life, but he thinks that he has seen enough of it to know this.

Every good thing is accompanied by something bad, and every bad thing carries with it the promise of something better. He wonders, on the ledger of good and bad things for him, is it time for something good yet? Something nice and easy and wonderful.

He wonders this, wishes for it, while sitting in a darkened lounge at the Cricket Club. The sun is long gone, and the room is a weird silver-gray from the cast of the TV. It seems simultaneously dimmer and less real on a flat screen, but it’s a color he knows well from the many years he’s had at Japanese Nationals. Two less than he ought, but that’s where the bad side of the ledger comes in. What he wouldn’t give to be there right now. There, instead of hiding out at his training rink that he hasn’t been able to properly practice in for over a month.

He counts along to the rotations and does rough estimates of the scores in his head while he goes through the tedious steps of treating his ankle. Take off the brace, ice, massage, turn it every which way, put the brace back on. Final step, painkillers.

He’s on the physical therapy step right now, wincing at the twinge he always gets when he stretches it a bit far to the right. At this point, it’s become less of a treatment routine and more of a ritual. He does it whenever he needs to calm down, needs to rein in his heart from wanting so much. And as with most rituals, it is accompanied by a prayer, a wish; _let me come back, let me skate again please._

His phones rings. The quarter-volume J-rock song sounds unimaginably loud in the room.

“Hello?”

“Yuzuru, where are you? Are you at the Cricket Club right now?” Brian asks, his voice is sleep-ridden but no less worried.

“Yes.”

Brian clicks his tongue. “Yuzuru, you know—”

“I know, I know,” Yuzuru says, cutting him off. “I am not practicing. Only watch Nationals on TV in room.”

There is a beat of silence, like an awkward music cut. There is not much left for Brian to say to Yuzuru that he hasn’t already, and it’s not his coach's fault. Sometimes Yuzuru wishes that he knew how to make it easier for Brian.

“Why don’t you watch it at home?” Brian asks.

“Didn’t want my mom to worry about how I feeling,” Yuzuru says.

Brian scoffs. “A bit too late for that, Yuzu. How do you think I knew to call you? She’s in a panic because she woke up, and you weren’t there.”

It makes sense that Yumi didn’t call him first. She knows that Yuzuru hates worrying her. She probably hoped that Brian would find out his location and silently report back to her. Then, the next morning, she could pretend as if she never noticed her missing son at all.

He doesn’t mean to say it with these words. He only sees his friends and teammates on TV and feels it formulate under his tongue before he can help it.

“I want to go home,” he says.

Brian sighs. He is understanding and comforting even when Yuzuru probably deserves to be scolded harshly and slapped on the back of his hand like a misbehaving elementary schooler. He says, “Then go home, Yuzuru. Get some rest. I know your ankle is still healing, but we’ll find more things that you can do in the meantime tomorrow.”

 

—

 

Yuzuru’s practice, if you can even call it a practice when he’s not even doing quads or triple axels yet, has ended. He stays behind to watch Javier. That’s something he’s gotten very good at. Just as Javier has. The two of them have spent the better part of five years watching each other, keeping an eye on each other.

Javier glides over to where Yuzuru is sitting, sipping green tea, his ankle wrapped in a cold press. Yuzuru smiles up at him.

“What are you still doing here?” Javier asks.

Yuzuru shrugs. “Bored. So I make sure Javier is ready for Europeans.”

“Oh, is that your job now?” Javier teases.

“Yes, did you know? Brian had his stomach part take out,” Yuzuru says, nodding solemnly. “I’m coach now.”

Javier laughs and says, “I don’t think it works like that. I’m pretty sure it would go to Tracy first. Then, maybe me. I’ve been here longer.”

“That’s true, but I’m still bored. So watch Javi.”

“Alright,” Javier says. He jerks his chin at Yuzuru’s ankle. “You’ll be better before you know it. Don’t worry.”

“Not soon enough,” Yuzuru says. He pinches the corner of the coldpress between his fingernails. “I disappoint so many people not skating NHK, and more with no Nationals. Need to be back at Pyeongchang. Can’t let down again.”

Javier chuckles, shaking his head, and Yuzuru glares at him.

“Is funny to you?”

“No, not really.” Javier looks down at his skates, and there is nothing funny to his expression. He looks like how Yuzuru feels on the longest nights alone. “I just never used to hear things like that. Remember when you first came to Canada? You never had to worry so much about disappointing other people. It was always you being frustrated with yourself. I know it’s impossible for everything to stay the same after so many years, but it feels like a simpler time. Sometimes I wish we could go back.”

Yuzuru hums. He will need to change his cold pack soon. He’s not sure he even remembers what he was like five years ago, and maybe that’s part of the problem. And Javier is just as lost as him. Time, you see, is not on their side.

“Me too,” Yuzuru says.

 

—

 

Here is what they don’t tell you about leaving home; the hardest part is coming back.

 

—

 

“I’m proud of your progress, Yuzuru. I am, but there’s less than a month till the Olympics. I think we need to address the possibility that you might not be in an ideal place when we get there,” Tracy says. She hands him a towel for his sweat after he’s done his first run-through of his long program with the triple axels put in since November.

“That’s okay,” Yuzuru says.

Tracy raises her eyebrows, clearly not believing the words left his mouth.

“Maybe not okay,” Yuzuru admits, “but I’m trying to be okay. I want skate for me, as me. If I can do that, then I be okay.”

She looks at him for a long time and reminds him of a lot of things simultaneously. His mom. All the kind older skaters during that summer of 60 ice shows. Her smile on that first day when his English skills were at the level of a remarkably smart toddler.

“I’m proud of you,” she says again.

 _Thank you,_ he thinks, _I’m trying to be proud of me, too._

 

—

 

Yuzuru remembers reading this book once. It wasn’t very long, and he doesn’t remember much of it, but there was a cabin in the mountains, enveloped into the woods. And the main character was warned not to stray too far from the cabin because you couldn’t trust all those living trees with their ageless rings to stay the same. If you strayed from the path, you were irrevocably lost once the cabin was out of your sights.

The main character was lost for a bit, and Yuzuru remembers being gripped with a consuming sense of panic until he’d made it back.

This is what happens to those who leave the path, those a little too brave and a little too willing to believe; they have a hard time figuring out the direction of home.

 

—

 

The first thought that occurs into Yuzuru’s mind when he arrives at the arena is, “It’s smaller than I remember.”

The second thought is, “Oh, it feels like Sochi.” Shortly followed by, “Oh, it feels like home.”

During official practice the next day, he puts both hands down onto the ice and breathes. Time, you see, is the most nebulous form of measurement. It can take you to whenever it wants with a familiar singularity or it can speed past without inviting you along or it can gulp down like dollops of molasses, fast and slow all at the same time.

 

—

 

After the short program, Yuzuru is happy. He is glad. He is a little nervous but not in a bad way. He is… a lot of things.

He is also taking his painkillers, the dosage higher to account for the competition. He’s at the end of his ankle ritual and thinks that he has been here before. He looks between his right ankle and his left foot and wonders about his ledger. A good short program at the Olympics. Where does this leave him?

He really, truly hopes that he’s still in the green. And hope, he finds, is a difficult thing to kill.

 

—

 

He bows in half, thanking his ankle of all things like a lunatic, but he’s kind of accepted that as fact by now. He collapses forward onto the ice, takes a knee down, and slams an entire palm onto it. He can feel the grooves and edges and cold even through his gloves. It’s a slight twitch to his muscle memory of four years.

It’s been four years, but he did it. He got his do over, his second chance, and how many people get to say that?

 _It’s been so long,_ he thinks, _I’m sorry, but I’m back now. Thank you for welcoming me home._

 

—

 

Somehow, he is first. Somehow, it’s been four years, and it isn’t Russia, but he’s back where so much began.

He’s wrapped up in Brian’s arms and then Tracy’s and then also Javier’s, and he’s crying with no end in sight. He’s crying because that is what you do when you have so much built up inside you that you can no longer tell where it begins and you end. They aren’t family, or maybe they are. They are at least something close enough to it that it hurts to leave sometimes. Since going to Toronto, there have been years when Yuzuru sees more of Toronto then he does of Sendai.

He has not felt this in too long. He was not the reigning Olympic Champion today. He was not the world-recorder holder. He was not the skater with the asthma or the earthquake or the collision or the multitude of injuries.

He was Yuzuru Hanyu, a boy who loved skating so much that he was willing to give it everything, even himself.

Maybe, in the coursing river of years, he had lost himself a little, but he thinks he’s found it again. In a rink that looks like Sochi, looks like home. In Brian and Tracy and how their hope is even harder to kill than his. In sharing a podium with someone who he has grown into watching and with someone who has kept him company at the top.

He’s come back to it, to all those eyes in the audience, and to himself.

 

—

 

Here is what they don’t tell you about leaving home; coming home feels entirely different yet utterly the same. We all know how to do it. The trick is remembering how to.

**Author's Note:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> it's been a day but i'm still [wilding](https://twitter.com/secwednesday)


End file.
